Asbestos was once a popular and widely used insulating material. However, it is now known that asbestos is a hazardous material and wide scale efforts have been undertaken to remove asbestos from commercial, industrial and residential buildings and other installations, such as, for example, schools, hospitals, office buildings, homes and the like. Methods heretofore available for removing asbestos from the walls, ceilings and other surfaces of such structures have heretofore been expensive and laborious. Most commonly, asbestos-containing material is first wetted and scraped from the surface on which it was deposited. This scraping is usually done manually, and because of the potential risk of exposure of personnel to asbestos materials during the scraping procedure, the personnel are required to wear protective clothing and breathing apparatus. Following the scraping procedure, the surface must be washed, again by hand, to remove any residual asbestos containing material that may not have been removed by the scraping procedure. Considerable effort and care is directed to making sure that all of the scraped material and washing solution is collected and disposed of, and not permitted to escape from containment. This overall procedure is quite laborious, and can require labor upwards of one man hour per square foot of surface from which asbestos containing material is to be removed.
It is known from U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,274,676 and 4,438,977, both to Chapel, to use an apparatus for removing material such as asbestos from a surface by sealing the edges of the apparatus against the surface so that the removed material will not escape into the ambient environment. This apparatus treats the material to be removed with a coagulant and then, subsequently or simultaneously with the coagulant treatment, cuts, scrapes and loosens the material from the surface. The loosened and coagulated material is then removed from the apparatus by suction.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,843,198, to Reynolds, there is disclosed a rock sampling tool which uses a compressed air driven rock cutting wheel and entrains dust formed thereby in an air stream that is drawn into a shroud around the cutting wheel. The dust is separated from the air in a cyclone separator.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,711,891 to Conway, there is described a carpet cleaning device which first sprays the carpet to be cleaned with a cleaning solution, vibrates the carpet and then exposes the carpet to vacuum to remove cleaning solution and dirt from the carpet.
As far as applicant is aware, there is no prior art disclosing an apparatus or method wherein an asbestos containing material layer on a surface can be cleaned by sequentially cutting, scraping and water spraying the asbestos-containing material layer, while simultaneously aspirating the asbestos-containing material and sprayed water together into a collection receptacle so that release of asbestos particles into the ambient atmosphere is minimized.